Title
The Impact of System Design Parameters on Application Noise Sensitivity
Abstract
Operating system noise, or “jitter,” is a key limiter of application scalability in high end computing systems. Several studies have attempted to quantify the sources and effects of system interference, though few of these studies show the influence that architectural and system characteristics have on the impact of OS noise at scale. In this paper, we examine the impact of three such system properties: platform balance, “noisy” node distribution, and non-blocking collective operations. Using a previouslydeveloped noise injection tool, we explore how the impact of noise varies with these platform characteristics. We provide detailed performance results that indicate that a system with relatively less network bandwidth is able to absorb more noise than a system with more network bandwidth. Our results also show that application performance can be significantly degraded by only a subset of noisy nodes. Furthermore, the placement of the noisy nodes is also important, especially for applications that make substantial use of collective communication operations that are tree-based. Lastly, performance results indicate that nonblocking collective operations have the ability to greatly mitigate the impact of OS interference. Combined, these results show that the impact of OS noise is not solely a property of application communication behavior, but is also influenced by other properties of the system architecture and system software environment.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1109/CLUSTER.2010.41
Cluster Computing
Keywords
Field
DocType
Operating systems interference,Jitter,System balance,Non-blocking collectives
System software,Noise measurement,Computer science,Parallel computing,Systems design,Real-time computing,Bandwidth (signal processing),Interference (wave propagation),Jitter,Systems architecture,Scalability
Conference
Volume
Issue
Citations 
16
1
15
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.65
22
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kurt Ferreira163940.78
Patrick G. Bridges263451.99
Ron Brightwell3106094.72
Kevin T. Pedretti419621.20